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Mac OS X in a Nutshell
The Gist The book is quite well structured, and organized into into 5 parts. The first is a quick overview of the Macintosh GUI. The second part, "System Configuration," is mainly devoted to getting the system running well (covering preferences, networking, the file system and Java). The third section, "System and Network Administration," is a good guide to several lower-level tasks, including an excellent chapter on directory services and NetInfo. The fourth is about development, including Apple's IDE "Project Builder" and CVS. The final part covers the Unix underpinnings of OS X and X Windows. This includes a Unix command reference of over 200 pages.
The Good The book is also well written, with light, easily understood prose and some good screen dumps, tables and diagrams to make some of the more complex points easily understood. I appreciate the detailed contents section, good quality index and black chapter tabs at the side of each page for finding the information I need.
Everything seems to be covered, though you may sometimes find yourself needing to go elsewhere for more depth, but this is really only to expected in a book that is trying more for breadth across an entire operating system than depth in one particular area.
Despite having used and developed on a Mac for over 15 years and OS X since the late beta stage I still found myself discovering something new and useful every few pages in the book.
The Bad The section of the book I appreciated least was the Unix Command Reference. 200 pages, most of which are adequately covered by the online man pages or a quick 'command --help'. Not that it isn't useful having this information on paper, and not that this section isn't more complete than the man pages and less error-ridden. It's just that my favourite operating system has a large number of commands that are hard to find by name alone. Online, I tend to rely on apropos to find what I need. Back when you paid a large amount of money for a Unix license they came with hard copy manuals that included a permuted word index of the same top slug that apropos searches, which made them infinitely more useful. O'Reilly could improve the heck out of this book by giving us the same thing for what I felt was otherwise an almost totally wasted 200 pages (though I admit that the combination of the chapter on NetInfo and the command references for nicl and niutil etc. actually have me now understanding and using NetInfo well.)
Once again O'Reilly have provided a web page for the book that is mostly marketing material -- though in this case the Errata page is useful. At the bottom of the page they have a number of links to "Related O'Reilly Articles" but have only listed three by the authors of the book, leaving out, for example, X11 and Open Office on Mac OS X by Wei-Meng Lee and Configuring sendmail On Jaguar by James Duncan Davidson to name two MacDevCenter articles I've found incredibly helpful.
Conclusion
This book is not quite in the "must buy" category. If you do want a book to help you with the more technical aspects of OS X or to help you move to OS X from Unix or Windows hacking then this one is worth a serious look. It certainly better covers the technical aspects than OS X Bible and others of that style (such as the Missing Manual or Robin Williams' Little Mac OS X Book.) The only other volume that really compares is OS X Unleashed and it has way too much coverage of the simple stuff and the various applications, is not as well structured and has a wordier, less terse and technical style. It's also more expensive and twice the size and weight.
You can purchase Mac OS X in a Nutshell from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
(For background, I come from experience of Linux command line/desktop [KDE, mainly] and Windows [for a greater period of time].)
1) There is no 'Menu' button. I do not want to have to run an Application to get a list of programs which I then have to click through. Mouse-over opening menus is nice. It doesn't have to be called Start, or 'K', or anything fancy but a button that has menus and sub-menus listing my appications would be a start.
2) I want the windows to store my settings. If I list applications by details, rather than as naff, huge icons, unless there is an option that I can find to tell it to store my settings, I expect it to be done automatically.
3) I want to be able to tab through all my Windows. Not just '1' of each application. If I have a terminal up and 2 Mozilla windows (not 1 window with tabs), I want the Apple key + Tab to be able to go through all 3.
4) I want it to tell me -- without requiring me to search in depth, and spend about 20 minutes -- what these shortcut keys are. I can't be the only one used to Linux/Windows, surely?
5) I want to be able to change settings in the 'Control Centre' without having to go back to the menu of options at each stage. This is just usability. If I want to go from one option to the next, I have to click one, which redraws my window, make changes, then click the button to show all the options. I can't a) look at more than one and b) have a list of options in the background (if you're changing something in every category it's handy to see where you're upto).
6) I want the maximise button (the +) to fscking well maximise. I don't mean 'get bigger' - I WILL DRAG THE WINDOW IF I WANT THAT. I WANT YOU TO MAXIMISE.
7) I want to be able to tell OSX what I want click events to do -- I want the double click on the title bar to MAXIMISE. NOT MINISE. I SHOULD BE ABLE TO TELL IT THIS.
8) I want the terminal to run faster than my P200 running Linux. If I run the default shell, or even more so bash, it crawls. I use the terminal to do things more quickly (maybe Apple knows this and deliberately sabotage it?).
9) I don't want to wait 10 minutes to boot up, which it sometimes feels like I have to.
10) When I put in the install CD after having formatted my disk, I'd like it to tell me it's not doing anything. I don't want to wait an hour, only to check online and realise that it doesn't do anything until I hold down some random combination of keys (which it doesn't say on screen) and go into debug mode that automatically starts the installer.
11) Why does my battery get chewed so badly? I get 3-3.5 hours in Linux, with an optical mouse plugged in but only 2 in OSX, with nothing in.
12) Why does my DVD/CD spin up randomly? This wastes battery life and is particularly annoying when I haven't tried to access anything on the CD/DVD or run anything that would need it.
13) Why can I not set power options directly after an install until rebooting? I've reinstalled twice and this annoys me. It doesn't say anything, I just can't unlock it until reboot. Why?
14) Why doesn't the manual tell me about what Mac thinks are executables? About what disk images are too Macs, etc? I now have undeletable shortcuts on my desktop.
15) Why are there lots of links in Finder to 'Applications' or 'Scripts' that WON'T RUN?
16) Why is it called 'Finder' in the first place?
17) Is it possible to navigate to root directory in 'Finder'? If so, it's got me stumped.
18) Why will it not auto update Stuff-It Expander in the OSX updates thing? How come when Stuff-It runs, it detectes there's an update, I click 'Not now', and it crashes? And this was trying to extract the update for itself. Prey tell how I'm meant to update it.
19) Give me an option to remove the desktop menu. I don't want a desktop menu at the top. I'm happy with my non-permanent ones. Really, I don't want it.
20) Why can I not drag files onto the CD-RW, or edit one that has some fi